My tomato plants are enormous, they are huge and leggy and bright, healthy green and covered with green tomatoes and NOT ONE ripe tomato yet and I should have had some weeks ago.

The gardening guy in the paper says it's a bad year for tomatoes. I bet mine will get blight before I even have ONE tomato.

Durn.

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Dig deeper.

But if you've got green ones, that's a good start, isn't it? Season isn't over yet.

But if all else fails, you can harvest them green, and either use them as green tomatoes, or leave them to ripen indoors, which they usually do.

We've got six tomato plants, and another one or two ripe on each of them each day at the moment.

We're having tomato soup twice a week at the moment.

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Artwork by Breogán - thank you, my friend!


Eine Blume der Asche meines Herzens


but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.

I've discovered that cherry tomatoes do well in containers, romas don't do as well, and better boys barely produced any. But it was fun to try.

But now that we have our own house, we'll start a garden in the ground. I also have to learn a bit about the flowers and shrubs that I have here and there around the yard. I really don't have much gardening experience, so I have a lot to learn. The former owners of this house told us that they let their grandkids plant lots of bulbs in one plot near the fence, so it will be fun to see what comes up in the spring. I also have a couple rose bushes, some sunflowers and some type of palm fern. A lot of weeding to do, since the house has been empty for so long before we were able to move in.

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Texas, Land of the Free, Home of the Tumbleweeds....

Does anyone here have experience growing blackcurrants?

Should we prune back the branches that bore fruit this year?

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I have a lot of experience eating black currants, if that helps. They are great just mashed with sugar, like uncooked jam.

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“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

Eleven years later, thread revived! I love it!

I've never even seen a currant, much less tended a tree. No help here.

I had wild red currants, red elderberries, raspberries, high bush cranberries, and low bush cranberries in my yard in Alaska. The moose pruned everything, so I didn't have to

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In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

~ Albert Camus

The RATS are pruning our tomatoes. Too many chicken coops and untended compost heaps nearby. Aarggghhh!

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Live traps work on rats. They figure out kill traps very quickly. Catch them live and then drown them. That's what we used to do when we had a rat problem in our chicken house. Then we got a rat terrier and she exterminated them. Several years after she died of old age, we still don't have rats. Either the cats have taken up the slack or word spread in the rat population that our place was not a safe place to visit.

That's too harrowing for us, Maria, especially since we've had beloved pet rats in the past. We're city folk. We're just going to be attentive about harvesting the tomatoes and hope the rats will wander on to richer pickings elsewhere.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King